Somewhere Under Starlight
by lyin
Summary: When their father died, Andromeda Tonks sent her sister Narcissa a card.


When their father died, Andromeda Tonks sent her sister Narcissa a card.

A great deal of owl post was coming through Malfoy manor that week, too many for Narcissa to recall which owl it had come from, whether it was brown or white, Great Horned or pygmy, whether it had come at dawn or after dark. It was piled up with all the rest, still tinged faintly with the scent of owl droppings Narcissa could not rid the room of no matter how many times she had Dobby clean it. It was a small envelope, like all of the others, no return address, and Narcissa thought nothing of it as she slid open the seal with a perfectly manicured nail.

She found it strange to find a flat, slim little card instead of folded paper. She did not at first think of Muggles when she saw it because she'd never learned enough about them to have the sick jolt of recognition. Narcissa was merely mildly distracted by the drawing of the night sky on its front and didn't bother to read the lettering, something about one more star. She was tired of hearing about stars, cold and faraway for all their brightness.

_Dear Cissy_, it read in a looping, beautiful hand she did not recognize at first. The ink lines were blue and startlingly skinny, almost mechanical instead of welling still with the liquid brightness of a quill.

The words _With my deepest sympathy in this time of sorrow_ were printed underneath, with the perfection of stamped lines, something that had come with the card. Andromeda's handwriting resumed below, more perfectly as if each dash and dot had been given great care.

_Call if you wish me to come._

_Sincerely,_

_Andy _

She stared at the word a moment, trying to think of who had sent it, before recollecting with a suddenness so sharp the temple of her forehead ached. Her sister had been 'Dromeda for so long now the girlhood name had fallen into the dark of Narcissa's memory.

It was the first contact Narcissa'd had with her sister in three years. She hadn't seen her in seven.

She was hideously furious that her sister had given her only these empty, repeated phrases and desperately curious what words of heat or sadness lurked unspoken or forgotten behind her lost sister's perfect penmanship.

She naturally didn't tell Bella she'd heard from Andromeda, nor even her mother but cried to Lucius later. He did his best to understand, patting her back, smoothing her hair, but snapped at her once and twice as well, since yes, Andromeda might have been a Black once but she was a blood traitor now, a disgrace to the father Narcissa was burying. He couldn't see, of course. He'd never had a sister. Narcissa told herself, as Lucius told her, she only had one now, but saying it didn't make it so.

They never shared rooms, since the Black sisters were from too much money for that, but hers and Andy's had been right next to each other, close enough that their father could check on them both sleeping from the same spot, or see which of their beds they were sitting on with their knees tucked up, talking into the midnight hours, and send them each packing off to their own. Cygnus Black had been an angry, furious youth, grown impossibly proud and immovably righteous, but for all that he never raised his voice or a hand to his daughters, however they might wander or rail. He called them princesses and treated them as such, as breakable, as the greatest of all his treasures.

Cygnus put a hole in the wall when Andromeda left but he also insisted she stay on the family tree in their house, refusing to let his wife or eldest daughter rub her out as his sister Walburga had in her house. He would leave a room in a flush should his middle daughter's name be so much as mentioned, but Narcissa once had caught him after, standing in his old spot, staring stoically at the closed door to her sister's empty bedroom.

No matter how furious Cygnus could be he always bore that gentility that Narcissa thought must course through the Black blue blood, a courtesy that hallmarked aristocracy which her cousin Sirius used to touch on in his boyhood gallantry and perhaps did still, which Regulus had held in his soft eyes, so like Andromeda's, a gentility that seemed somehow to have missed Bella as surely as it had their Aunt Walburga, both with their diamond souls.

She wondered if her and Lucius' child to come would have eyes of gentleness or of diamond ice. Either, she thought, might break her heart.

1979 had been a hard, hard year already and fast getting harder. Regulus, so young and promising, gone in suddenness and mystery and followed fast by his shattered father, only fifty though age was hitting him hard. Her father had still looked young next to his cousin Orion whom he had grown up with like a brother, still the handsomer brother beside her Uncle Alphard, his hair still dark, waist still relatively trim. It seemed impossible he should go so soon and yet naturally. Cygnus Black was only fifty. He should have had another half-century ahead, at least another thirty years for Narcissa to have her father's gentle surety to rely on.

The Blacks always seemed to be cheated of long years. She couldn't say why, except that in their own ways they were almost too alive, too powerful or present or great or furious, their hearts too inflamed with pure pride and passion to keep burning.

Narcissa wanted to go hold her sisters' hands but there was a ring on Andromeda's that forbid it and Bella had never been one for hand-holding, even when they were small, so she cried only into her own hair and searched her blue eyes vainly in her hand mirror for the softness that had been in her father's blue-greys, the same as Andromeda's.

Though far away, she knew somewhere under starlight her sister's eyes were shining at the husband and child Narcissa had never met, and turning away from the glass and the steel she found casing any gentleness in her own, she took what comfort she could and steadied herself to go tell her father good-bye.

She never did call, but she always kept the card.


End file.
